The Hubble Space Telescope is a space telescope that orbits in low earth orbit and take pictures of space. It’s main purpose is to take picture of extremely distantly objects in space with the ability to capture a wide range of light from ultraviolet to infrared. In order for the telescope to do this, it needs two large and heavy mirrors, and the ability to remain extraordinarily steady so the shot isn’t blurry. The Hubble telescope is capable of not deviating from a target more than 7/100 of an arcsecond(unit of distance). That is about the width of a human hair seen a mile away. It transmits about 150Gb of data back to a receiver on Earth a week. The telescope receives about 5,500 watts of power from the sun using two large solar panels.
The telescope is roughly 44 feet long and weighs about 24,000 lb. It was named after Edwin P. Hubble, who confirmed the theory of an “expanding” universe and thus proved the existence of a “big bang”. It primarily uses two mirrors to capture the images. One larger, lighter mirror, and one smaller, heavier mirror. The light enters into the telescope, bounces off the first concave mirror into the second mirror, then bounces off the second mirror into a hole in the first mirror and into the camera. This increases the telescope’s focal length. The camera then transmits the image over radio waves back to a receiver on Earth.
It was launched from Earth on April 24, 1990. It was operational the day after. It then required 5 manned missions to fix issues or recalibrate sensors. The first service mission was in 1993 to fix the primary lense when it was discovered to be the cause of out of focus images. Other service missions were to fix or replace several other parts of the telescope from the solar panels to the internal sensors.
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thanks for the very informational breakdown of how the hubble telescope works and the crazy science of how it receives pictures and information. It is still crazy that it launched a long time ago in 1990 and to see how much technology has changed and the power we have with the machines today its interesting and important to know where all of that came from.
ReplyDeleteThanks for providing some details on this amazing engineering feat and how it works. This really highlights the technological advancements which began to speed up from the 1990s to the 2000s. I found it interesting how the telescope is able to transfer gigabytes of data back to Earth using radio waves, while still maintaining such amazing focus.
ReplyDeleteNick, great post on the history and mechanics of the Hubble Space Telescope. As it turns out, the Hubble Space Telescope was ready and scheduled for launch in October of 1986. However, following the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger, all space travel to cease for two years and causing the telescope to move into storage for the time being. While the telescope was not forgotten during the period from the Challenger disaster to launch, it was delayed by almost 4 years. From this, I think it is amazing that the US worked to continue the pursuit of space exploration even after it experienced such a tragic and publicized disaster like the Challenger explosion. Even after this long delay, it was unfortunate that the primary lense was out of focus, given all the additional time engineers had to work on the telescope.
ReplyDeletehttp://hubblesite.org/the_telescope/hubble_essentials/